Today Means Amen Read online

  . . . it is that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches

  of what humans can find out about each other.

  —Jason Shinder, “Coda”

  This book is dedicated to my dear friend Sam.

  contents

  BOWL OF DIAMONDS

  In the In-Between

  My Lover Found Me Weeping on the Couch

  The Origin of the Heart as an Indicator of Love

  Without

  Small Poem

  I Have Mistaken Myself

  Seven Layers of Hell

  Uninhabitable

  A BEEHIVE PITCHED IN THE RIVER

  The Living Room Needs a New Coat of Paint

  The Origin of the Funeral Hat

  For My Niece Livia, Age 8

  A Thousand Pieces

  Progress Report

  In the Train Station in Munich

  Thanksgiving, 2011

  God Bless Your Fingers

  Your Love Finds Its Way Back

  Missouri

  Remember

  PAY THE BOATMAN

  Happy New Year

  A Stranger Died in an Avalanche

  The Origin of Breast Milk

  Beautiful

  Teeth

  Exodus 33:20

  Ode to My Bottom Lip

  I Was Asked to Speak at Your Wedding

  Gardener’s Daughter

  Telephone

  Floating

  After Googling Affirmations for Abuse Survivors

  SOME INVISIBLE MACHINE

  It Rained for Two Days Straight

  Won’t You Let Me?

  Thirteen Stanzas for Sarah Winchester

  Whom I Think I Understand

  This, Too, Is Not for You

  Made for Blood

  One More Theory about Money

  Existential Crisis Brought Forth by

  Complaining about My Boyfriend over

  a Basket of Cheese Curds

  The Origin of the Bathrobe

  At the End of the Day, I Am an Animal

  Facts Written from an Airplane

  Mantra to Overcome Depression

  SING TO ME THEN

  Prayer: Hope, Screaming

  The Two Poet-Daughters

  These Hours I Have Not Lost

  but Do Not Remember

  Today Means Amen

  Release It

  Tonight in Yoga

  The Lucky Grow Old

  The Day of the Last Fire

  Chai & Whiskey

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  BOWL OF DIAMONDS

  In the In-Between

  We finally decided to leave each other.

  To throw in the towel as they say, which

  makes me think of our love as some

  red-faced boxer—lips ballooning, eyes

  disappearing inside themselves—or,

  as a laboring woman—belly round, heeing

  and hawing. Our love trying to push out

  new life, and us, two scared nurses, dabbing

  away the sweat on her brow or cleaning

  the blood from his busted lip. Our love:

  not pregnant, nor a good left hook, but

  it did put up one hell of a fight. We chose

  to forfeit, to finish it. Our love: some

  shitty novel or a board game that just

  goes on and on forever—just end it!

  Maybe it’s an animal struck down

  by a car. I’ve heard deer make the most

  human of noises as they die—just

  end it. The night we did, we slept

  the kind of touchless sleep that follows

  a funeral. I woke midday to the sound

  of stillness, nothing, and knew where

  our love lives now. Our bodies

  refusing to rouse to a world bled of it.

  Some part of us wanted to stay there,

  in the in-between, where the baby

  isn’t stillborn, where the deer runs off

  into the meadow, where the boxer

  just gets up, punch after punch,

  and the rounds go on forever.

  My Lover Found Me Weeping

  on the Couch

  reading the obituary of a local father,

  not much older than you or I, whose body

  betrayed him too soon—or should I say at all,

  ever, because what kind of body is so disloyal

  as to feed a tumor until it is fat as a blister

  inside the skull, a snail too big for its shell—

  I couldn’t help but think of the boy, his son,

  still in that intangible stage between baby

  and person, between magic is real and magic

  is not real because if it was, it would have

  saved my father. I wept for him and sneered

  at the audacity of death, how it is the boldest

  of all things, how it comes and goes as it pleases.

  And once I was done, once everything was dry

  and dull again, my lover looked at me and said,

  “Sometimes, it’s obvious you have never lost

  someone.” He, whose mother was taken from him

  by her own body. He, who became one of those

  parentless boys whose entire class showed up

  for the funeral. This, which is not at all beautiful

  nor poetic. Me, who still writes about it, who

  gasps at death’s sleight of hand, not knowing

  how the trick actually works: no trap door,

  no encore, no white dove buried up a sleeve.

  Is empathy just a pretty mask for privilege?

  One day, my father will die and I will be lucky

  that it wasn’t today. Perhaps then I will stop

  writing these poems, no longer a weeping tourist,

  a trite spectator caught between the glory of god

  is real and god is not real because if he was, if he was.

  The Origin of the Heart as

  an Indicator of Love

  Sylvia Plath sat down at her kitchen table

  and began to cut the beets into neat,

  equal pieces. Their juice, a bottomless

  pink, spilled out eagerly—each vegetable

  a blood-heavy sponge. When she finished,

  she wiped her hands on the front of her blouse,

  smearing a cave painting across her chest.

  Ted came home just as she was turning on

  the oven. He saw the stain first, then her face,

  pressed his fingers against the redness

  and said I want to be here. He smelled

  of unfamiliar perfume but she didn’t care.

  That man had looked right at her and said

  he wanted to be right there: in the fluttering,

  in the birdcage, against the ringing bell.

  That night, they made love like two cadavers

  reorganizing their organs. Later, while he

  snored, the other woman’s teeth still rattling

  in his throat, Sylvia wrote in her journal:

  I have found it—the source of all my trouble,

  the maker of all the racket. This bloody maraca.

  This wild polygraph. It must know my truth.

  I just need to listen. Listen. And yet? All I hear

&
nbsp; is the endless procession, the pounding voice:

  stay go / stay go / stay go

  Without

  There is a stage in early childhood development

  when a baby realizes for the first time that

  he is not, in fact, part of his mother’s body.

  That their heartbeats don’t float together

  down the river of her arm or pass each other

  like corresponding voices along telephone wires.

  One day, when she leaves the room, the baby

  will comprehend that he is actually alone.

  Such a heavy thought for something so small.

  And, yes, perhaps it is strange to describe

  myself as your child. It is problematic

  to compare you—once my lover—to

  my mother. You, who have painted my body

  with your body. You, who startled the crows

  of my heart. You are not my mother but

  we did live inside each other for months.

  It is the only adequate way I found to describe it.

  One day, long after you left, I finally realized

  you were actually gone. The suddenness.

  The spark. Learning a new word for without.

  Small Poem

  My sister is sick. Her belly is a flat lake.

  Her mind is wrapped in a blanket of thistles.

  I try to tell her it isn’t the engine’s fault

  when the car doesn’t start. She doesn’t listen.

  Her mind is wrapping a blanket of thistles

  over her body, the small bird of her neck.

  When the car doesn’t start correctly, we listen

  to it cough and heave itself into the toilet.

  Her body is the smallest bird. Her neck

  peels itself open (when she is too much)

  to cough and heave herself into the toilet.

  I do not want to write her as a sieve,

  who peels herself open, who is never enough.

  But she is disappearing before my eyes.

  I do not want to write this. To sieve

  my sister into a poem so small

  but she is disappearing before my eyes.

  My sister is sick. Her belly is a flat lake.

  My sister is turning into the smallest poem.

  She tells me it’s the engine’s fault.

  I Have Mistaken Myself

  On the flight home, I cry

  over a man who does not

  love me. There is no stopping

  the tears that flock to my ache

  like needy children. The first,

  the boldest, comes with

  no warning just as the engine

  begins its yearning howl.

  Just as the plane’s nose

  abandons the earth to point

  itself upward to face God,

  or nothingness, which is

  to say love. I pretend I am

  just afraid of heights when

  the attendant’s eyebrows

  pout with false concern:

  Is this your first time flying?

  I have carried too many

  men around. Would you

  like a glass of water? I have

  mistaken myself for a bowl

  of diamonds. Don’t worry

  dear. It will be over soon.

  Really, who could love

  an ox? Spent and blistered,

  always dragging this bloody

  plow. Listen to it scrape across

  the pavement. Look at all

  the land I’ve tilled. Look at all

  the shit I could bury him in.

  Seven Layers of Hell

  In this room, a thousand

  newborn mosquitoes.

  In this room, Frida Kahlo

  serves dinner to a crowd

  of laughing white men

  on her hands and knees.

  In this room, every person

  I ever regret fucking and

  the sound of their orgasm.

  In this room, the best

  minds of my generation,

  endless amounts of whiskey

  and rope, one shotgun,

  hundreds of bullets.

  In this room, no matter

  how hard I try, I cannot

  remember your name.

  In this room, every picture

  is hung crookedly

  and out of reach.

  In this room, the baby

  we never had is crying.

  Uninhabitable

  My father still lives in the house he built

  for my mother. He calls himself a bachelor,

  not a hoarder, but you can measure how long

  she’s been gone by the piles of expired

  mail, the dishes, the sun-stained photos

  framed in dust—tree rings of his solitude.

  When he speaks of his recovery, he lowers

  his voice, even though we are on the phone.

  He tells me he isn’t ashamed of what he did

  or where he has been or what he put my mother

  through, but I think he means that he does

  not allow himself the luxury of forgetting.

  :::

  I am writing about you again today and

  I wonder, why dig up our sad corpse?

  Why put the spleen back, a spoiled balloon,

  already burst, but here I am huffing life back

  into it. Nursing our fruitless love. Sometimes,

  I still can’t believe it. That you happened

  and I happened and this was the best we could

  do. Our nest of rubbish, our flowerless

  garden—we slept here. Made love among

  the bottle caps and ants and mold.

  :::

  My father told me he still imagines

  getting back together with my mother,

  maybe someday, after her new husband dies.

  I think he means he started to build a house

  and left it unfinished. What is it about

  this family that draws us back to

  the uninhabitable? That compels us

  to make a bed where there isn’t one?

  A BEEHIVE PITCHED

  IN THE RIVER

  The Living Room Needs

  a New Coat of Paint

  When I asked for it, you built a sturdy table

  for our kitchen, even though it was summer

  and you had to work outside with the mosquitoes.

  You sanded down all the sharp edges, stained

  its thick legs. You tuned each ivory tooth

  of that old piano we found on the side

  of the road. You tightened the fan above

  our bed, the one that used to wobble,

  seasick, like a drunk. You unclogged

  the shower drain, fished out a month

  of my hair. You are always fixing things.

  But what is this, my love? A crack

  in the ceiling. A faulty pilot light.

  A keyhole in my sternum that opens

  to an ocean of doubt. I stared into

  your chest last night as if it were

  a telescope. I saw our future

  in the distance, an island

  I will not swim to. I have

  eaten my own legs.

  I have cut my own

  stitches. My love:

  you cannot fix

  what wants

  to be bro-

  ken.

  The Origin of the Funeral Hat

  Twice, Coretta King dreamt

>   of her husband’s assassination.

  In the first dream, she sat frozen

  as a centerpiece. He calmly opened

  his mouth to let the bullet in like

  a newborn leaning into a nipple.

  In the second, he was dancing

  in an uncrossable ballroom

  and she could only watch

  as a hundred tiny metal fists beat

  themselves against his impervious

  chest. Both nights she woke

  in a sweat, shook him, whispered

  “Martin, Martin,” the way she

  used to when they first tried on

  each other’s bodies, until her

  husband finally came back

  from sleep. Coretta always knew

  what was coming. She grew up

  watching boys who looked

  like her husband grow up into

  dead things, knew it was only

  a matter of time—but when that

  time came, all the fear left her body

  like a procession. She wore a tall,

  thatched hat to the funeral, black

  as a crow’s beak, and a veil circling